How does your company handle times of extreme challenge?

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EKG Pulse Graph with Glowing Blue Line

Our reader poll today asks: How does your company handle times of extreme challenge?

  • We hunker down and don’t do anything different until things calm down. 16%
  • We play defensively but take on small new initiatives with low risk. 37%
  • We aggressively seek new opportunities and invest behind them. 48%

Seizing the moment: While the poll is split on those playing offense and those playing defense, the implications are pretty clear. For those acting defensively, you need to factor in how other market participants will behave when calculating your stance. If you’re not factoring in the aggressive 48% into your expectations, your defensive stance might cost you more than you anticipate. Strategy isn’t just about your actions – it’s about your actions in relation to other players in the market. You might find your defensive strategy puts you further behind your more aggressive competition and when you come out of that defensive stance ready to compete aggressively again, you may have a lot of catch-up to play. While being defensive is certainly understandable, you could be creating many more risks than you believe you are. Conduct a rigorous market assessment before choosing a stance.

Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Did you enjoy this post?  If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog.  It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!).  SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

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The Shocking Trait That Undermines Your Leadership Credibility

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Credibility is the foundation of effective leadership.

Today’s post is by Alain Hunkins, author of Cracking the Leadership Code (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

Clint is the co-founder of a software company that’s experienced rapid growth over the past three years.  He’s smart, outgoing, and great in front of customers.  In fact, Clint is the sales team’s go-to to close big accounts.  The sales team has nicknamed him Midas, because everything he touches turns to gold. On top of all that, Clint’s a genuinely nice guy.

However, for all of his strengths, Clint has a tragic flaw.  He’s consistently late for meetings.  Ten, twenty, thirty minutes late is par for the course with Clint, and sometime more.  Clint is also the master of coming up with reasons why he’s late—this customer meeting went long, that operational issue needed his time, the traffic from the airport was atrocious.

However, as much as Clint tries to explain each instance away, his team’s not having it anymore.  Clint’s invisibility is having a visible impact on engagement and morale—from the top straight on down.  Whether he realizes it or not, Clint’s been shooting his credibility in the foot.  It’s hurting his leadership and having an impact on the company.

If you want to be a great leader, and have those you lead perform at their best, the onus is on you to create an effective leader-follower relationship. You set the tone. You lay the groundwork of connection for what that relationship will become. The first step on that journey is establishing your credibility.

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How Smart Leaders Get Their Teams to Exceptional Results

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In this episode of Innovating Leadership Maureen Metcalf, thoughtLEADERS Principal, interviews Victor Prince, a fellow thoughtLEADERS Principal, about guiding leaders to exceptional results.

In today’s interview, Victor talks about the power of applying the “Leadership Matrix” -the box- to team management.

He will describe what exactly the Leadership Matrix is, how it works, and how it will help you get the best out of yourself and your team.

Victor, through all of this, will also answer a few of the below questions:

Who should read Lead Inside the Box?

What problem does it help them solve and how do you help people solve that problem?

He will walk us through the different parts of the Leadership Matrix, explain the four boxes and how to utilize this tool to allocate leadership time by the various groups.  Victor provides great insights about how this structure helps managers and leaders think through what employees need using a framework to categorize where they are right now. This tool can also help shift people to become more productive.

Stay tuned for more of these leadership discussions between Maureen and Victor, along with a few other team members from thoughtLEADERS, being featured on the Innovating Leadership podcast.

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Leadership the AirBnb Way

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Sometimes the best leaders are the ones at the back of the pack, helping to drive everything forward and sometimes they are out front, and other times it benefits to be both, just like AirBnb.

Today’s post is by Joseph Michelli, author of The AirBnb Way (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

Around 2007, Simon Cooper was the CEO of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company, where I was working with their senior leadership team. Simon and I were exploring how Ritz-Carlton could adapt to meet the needs of changing luxury travelers without losing the company’s legacy customer base. Simon offered an example of the challenges faced by the luxury hotel company in 2008, “I had a guest complain to me that he saw one of our bartenders serve a young guest a bottle of beer without a glass. When I looked into it, I informed the complaining guest that the service was a result of the young guest having asked for his beer to be served that way a day before. That is the challenge … to customize the experience to the guest, ensuring that traditional and new-generation guests are each treated respectfully in accord with their wishes.”

In that same year, two men in San Francisco (Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia) were facing a very different accommodation challenge. They were trying to make rent for their apartment after a third roommate moved out. Since Brian and Joe had recently graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and given that a design conference was coming to San Francisco, the roommates decided to create a make-shift website targeted to conference attendees. They planned to place three air mattresses in the spare room and offer breakfast (in the form of uncooked pop tarts) for $80 per night, per guest, for the duration of the conference. A little over a decade later, that air mattress bed and breakfast arrangement has turned into Airbnb (a company that lists more than seven million properties on its well-evolved digital marketplace – 14,000 listings are tiny homes, 2,500 are tree houses, and 5,000 are castles).

In my book, The Airbnb Way, I detail the business strategy that fueled Airbnb’s meteoric rise. For the purposes of this article, I’ll focus on the three elements of leadership, which set the foundation for Airbnb’s impact on the hospitality sector. Those three components are:

Identification of a Disruptive Gap and Innovation to Fill It

Open Mindsets of Founders and Leaders

Clarity of a Branded Experience

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How important is it to your employees that you treat them consistently with one another?

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EKG Pulse Graph with Glowing Blue Line

Our reader poll today asks: How important is it to your employees that you treat them consistently with one another?

  • Extremely: They want everyone to always be treated equally: 51.14%
  • Very: They’ll tolerate some special treatment but not very much: 31.99%
  • Somewhat: Some want consistent treatment, while others don’t seem to care: 11.34%
  • Not very: Most of them only worry about how they’re treated themselves: 4.28%
  • Not at all: Special and different treatment is an accepted norm: 1.25%

Fair versus equal? The majority of you said your team members want consistency and equal treatment. Be sure you have a perspective on equal versus fair though. Should a new hire be held to the same equal standards of performance as a senior peer in a similar role? Should someone be given time off to handle a personal issue while another person who doesn’t have a personal issue be denied the same time off? Equality absolutely matters on the vast majority of topics. Your challenge is figuring out when fairness comes into play and how to apply it. A big part of doing that right is explaining the difference to people and when you make decisions that aren’t necessarily equal or consistent that you’re able to explain to them why you did what you did and why it is fair. These are challenging topics to navigate. As long as you’re doing what is right and explain things, you can have a productive conversation. Also be open to other perspectives on how to handle the situation because “fair” to you might not seem fair to someone else. Enlist the aid of trusted advisers for those challenging situations.

Do you agree with these poll results? Let us know in the comments below!

– Mike Figliuolo at thoughtLEADERS, LLC

Did you enjoy this post?  If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog.  It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!).  SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!

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How and Why You Should Prepare for More Women in the Workforce

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More women in the workforce will impact your culture and leadership. Understanding the needs of this new model will put you far ahead of your competition.  

Today’s post is by Andreas Wilderer, author of Lean On (CLICK HERE to get your copy).

The number of women in the American workforce has now edged past the number of men for only the second time ever, according to a recent Washington Post article, and we have reason to believe this trend is here to stay. In fact, in 2016 and 2017 the number of women receiving bachelor’s degrees surpassed men by 14 percent.

Meanwhile, over the last 30 years, the percentage of stay-at-home dads has also risen. In the U.S. these numbers have steadily increased from 4 percent to 7 percent, according to the Pew Research Center. In Canada reports show that fathers account for 10 percent of all stay-at-home parents. This is undoubtedly another clear indication that times are changing and that families are beginning to embrace non-traditional roles. The question is, is everyone else?

In my book Lean On, I tell my story about being a stay-at-home dad, married to a successful female executive. Having been in the stay-at-home-dad role for 13 years, I have experienced what it is like for those living in a non-traditional family model.

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